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Bloomberg Businessweek October 7, 2019J
ason Levin stood on a craggy hill on a Southern California
ranch in late July and prepared to destroy a drone. First
he grabbed the controls for an Up Air One, a remote control
hobbyist model that retails for about $300, and steered it
until it was hovering about 100 feet above the ground. Next
he used a laptop to activate a system he’d spent the past sev-
eral months building.
A second drone roughly the size of the Up Air quad-
copter spun into action, buzzing like a mechanical wasp
as it ascended to about 20 feet below its target. As it hov-
ered, a crowd of Levin’s colleagues gathered around. A
prompt appeared on-screen asking for permission to attack.
Levin tapped a button, and the second drone, dubbed the
Interceptor, shot upward, striking the Up Air One at 100 mph.
The two aircraft somersaulted skyward briefly, then they
plummeted back to earth and landed with two satisfying
thuds. Levin grinned and explained that he hadn’t been con-
trolling the Interceptor after telling it to attack—it finds tar-
gets and steers toward them on its own. If the first collision
doesn’t take its quarry down, the drone can circle back and
strike a second and third time, all by itself. “It’s a good feel-
ing as an engineer,” he said. “You’ve put in the work, and it
knows what to do. It’s like sending your kid off to college.”
The Pentagon has spent years searching for reliable ways
to combat consumer drones that have been repurposed as
reconnaissance craft or bombers. Anduril Industries Inc., the
2-year-old startup in Irvine, Calif., where Levin is one of about
130 employees, began shipping Interceptors to military clients
in the U.S. and the U.K. earlier this year; it’s sent dozens so
far and has hundreds more in production. The company says
its most recent contract is to deploy Interceptors overseas
to conflict zones, though it declines to provide details. This
summer it raised $120 million from Founders Fund, GeneralCatalyst, Andreessen Horowitz (in which Bloomberg LP, which
ownsBloomberg Businessweek, is an investor), and other ven-
ture capital firms. Investors valued the company at about
$1 billion, four times its last funding round in 2018.
Anduril already had contracts to build surveillance systems
on military bases and along the Mexican border, using tow-
ers and drones packed with cameras and other sensors. Its
software then processes the field data, alerting officers and
soldiers to possible disturbances. But the company wants to
move beyond simply identifying threats using computers. The
Interceptor, which Anduril hasn’t previously discussed pub-
licly, is its first computer-operated weapon.
Silicon Valley has a long history of supplying the Pentagon,
but the two have drifted apart over the past 50 years. Today
the Department of Defense relies mostly on a few traditional
suppliers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop
Grumman. It’s had little use for startups. Commercial tech
companies haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about gov-
ernment work, either, and the antipathy has increased since
the election of Donald Trump.
Last year a group of Google employees resigned in protest
of the company’s work on Project Maven, a program to use
artificial intelligence software to analyze drone imagery.
Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., then announced it would
stop working on the project, embarrassing and angering U.S.
officials in the process. Workers at Amazon.com, Microsoft,
Palantir, and other companies have also demanded that their
employers cancel contracts with military, law enforcement,
and federal agencies that are enacting Trump’s border and
immigration policies.
The protesters have argued that technologists shouldn’t
build products without regard for the way they’re used. In
mid-September, Seth Vargo, a former employee of Chef
Software Inc., a Seattle company, deleted
publicly available code he’d written for its
systems after finding out Chef worked with
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“When I learned that my code was being
used for purposes that I perceive as evil, I
had to act,” he says. A week later, Chef said
it would stop working with the agency.
Anduril presents itself as immune to such
angst. Its founder, Palmer Luckey, is one of
Silicon Valley’s most famous Trump parti-
sans. The 27-year-old has gleefully trolled
the Valley’s liberals since he left Facebook
Inc. in 2017 under controversial circum-
stances. Founders Fund, one of Anduril’s
first big investors, was started by another
Trump stalwart, Peter Thiel. Trae Stephens,
Anduril’s chairman, is also a Founders Fund
partner and took part in Trump’s transition
team. The company recently began working
on Maven, the project Google dropped.
Executives at the company say they’re
The Interceptorless interested in serving any particular